I’ve complained that arguing via Twitter is a bad idea.  The problem is that you get 140 characters to make your point, and that’s it.  So reading a tweet that’s truly stupid, but requires more than 140 characters to respond to, creates a dilemma.  There’s TwitLonger for some of those cases, or I can link it up to my blog as I’m doing in this case, but there’s no way to know how many people will actually read the reply.

Another issue is, while you might reply to the person that said it, and you include “@” + their Twitter name so they will see it, not everyone who read the tweet will see it.  This is complicated by the fact that users can retweet posts that they like, spreading the message (but no replies) far and wide.

And, there are far more atheists using Twitter than theists.  Which means that, when an atheist says something that’s plain ignorant but is catchy nonetheless, it is going to get read and retweeted dozens of times.  Even if a theist writes a reply, the damage is already done.  Few (if any) will see the reply.

Twitter user Monicks (whose real name appears to be Monica), has the ignorant tweet of (perhaps) the year.  Maybe not, since we’re only in April (the best month of the year, and yesterday was the best day of the year).  But it’s still pretty ignorant.  Monica says:

I’m not subscribed to Monica, so the only reason I saw it is because she was retweeted by ThinkAtheist, who I do subscribe to.  Monica has 5,609 subscribers and ThinkAtheist has 8,934 subscribers.  That particular tweet was retweeted by at least 12 other users, so it looks like way more people have seen that tweet than will ever see this reply.  But I wanted to try anyway. Read the rest of this entry →